Mark,
At the risk of appalling you further, I'm curious how many
expressions you keep on your expression list. My basic template
has 12, of which two I never use anymore and could probably
delete. I get the impression that I'm in a minority here and most
people keep a longer list.
Like most people, I have more than 12 dynamic expressions alone.
Finale's template comes with 17 (ffff through pppp, various fp's and
sfz's, and a sub. p.). Since you do vocal music, you'd want a second
set of dynamics set to auto-position above the staff or note,
assigned to separate metatools. (There is a MakeMusic-provided vocal
dynamics library that you can use as a starting point.)
For orchestral music, I have metatools for all the dynamics; mute,
mute out, and mute off; arco and pizz.; solo and tutti; div. and
unis., a2, 1., 2., 3., 4.; sul tasto, sul pont., ord., and many others.
If I'm doing vocal music, I switch to a template that has 1-0 as the
normal, below-staff dynamics, and Q-P as the vocal dynamics.
There are also the articulation, smart shape, and staff style
metatools, which I use constantly, and the clef, key signature, and
time signature metatools, which I use whenever practical.
Cheers,
- Darcy
-----
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Brooklyn, NY
On 29 Apr 2007, at 2:36 AM, Mark D Lew wrote:
On Apr 28, 2007, at 9:34 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote:
But of course, using the Horiztonal Offset in the expression
definition, you CAN specify an absolute offset from beat position.
That's just one of the many benefits of the Fin2004+ expressions.
And, as you point out, there's just no way selecting expressions
from the list can ever be remotely as efficient as working with
metatools -- and that's even without the substantial added
benefits of auto-positioning. I admit that I find myself vaguely
appalled that Mark still selects dynamics from the expression
list. He probably still pays his bills by mail, too. [grin]
Only one of them, and that's only because I can't pay it by phone.
My first choice for paying bills is to pay by credit card over the
phone just punching numbers without having to talk to a person.
That's me: not too high-tech, not too low-tech, but somewhere
comfortably in the middle. (But you'll be happy to know I do use
browser tabs now. I'm not sure what got me started, but I've been
doing it since some time last fall, I think.)
At the risk of appalling you further, I'm curious how many
expressions you keep on your expression list. My basic template
has 12, of which two I never use anymore and could probably
delete. I get the impression that I'm in a minority here and most
people keep a longer list.
In my experience there's only a couple of them that recur
frequently enough to be worth programming individually. Others I
have on the list just to cannibalize their specs. For example, one
of my 12 just says "Tempo", and then I edit it to whatever tempo I
need, duplicating if I need more than one. It seems silly to have
a mile-long list of expressions just so that Allegro, Adagio,
Moderato, Andante, Largo, etc, etc, etc, are all pre-programmed,
and besides there's always going to be something unusual that's not
on your list anyway. Same idea for all the misc markings that will
be in small italic. As often as not, you're going to encounter
something that isn't already on the list anyway, so I just type
each one new for each piece as needed. As a result my expression
list for any given file is not much more than what's needed for
that particular piece, so there's never very far to hunt.
My articulation list, on the other hand, is voluminous, and heavily
metatooled. That's because articulations -- for me, at least --
are defined in far more detail and are more regular in their
usage. My basic template has 40 articulations defined. Of those,
17 have metatools (mostly in pairs), which more or less corresponds
to the ones I use frequently.
mdl
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